VI
Colonel Roosevelt’s last visit to his desk in the editorial rooms of The Star was early in October, 1918. It struck those who had been associated with him that he was not quite as fit as usual. I asked him if it were true the physicians had placed him on a diet. He said it was, but, to be frank, he had not given much heed to their recommendations. In a discussion at his desk with men of the editorial force a recent article about Roosevelt by George Creel came up. “I must admit,” said Colonel Roosevelt, laughing, “he took a rather jaundiced view of me.”
Mr. Kirkwood was away in the army, but Mrs. Kirkwood was in Kansas City and the Colonel stayed at their home during his visit. At this time a subject was brought up which had been talked over along in the summer—a visit from him to the battle front to write at first hand of the American forces. Newspapers which were receiving the service and others which had heard of the suggestion were eager for Roosevelt articles from France, but from the first the Colonel had demurred and now said a final “No.” His reason was that he could not go as a private citizen, as he had been denied permission to go as a soldier; it would not only be unbecoming for a former president of the United States to go in any newspaper capacity, but how to treat him would be an embarrassing question to France.
The tide had turned toward the Allies, and the country was certain the defeat of the enemy was a question of a short time. Colonel Roosevelt’s articles turned to a discussion of the kind of peace there should be and examinations of the President’s “Fourteen Points” and his notes to Austria. On November 11—the day the armistice was signed—it was considered necessary for Colonel Roosevelt to go to a hospital in New York. From his hospital room he telegraphed that day an editorial joining in the general rejoicing over peace and appraising tersely our part in the war.
A few days later there came an editorial prompted by a letter from a woman friend in California. Visiting this friend was another woman whose son had died of influenza in the navy. That mother had said she had given her boy proudly to her country, “but if only he could have died with a gun in his hand—a little glory for him and a thought for me that my sacrifice had not been useless.” The California friend had written: “There must be other mothers who feel they have laid their sacrifices on cold altars. You have written much that will comfort the mothers whose sons have paid with their bodies in battle. Isn’t there something you can say to comfort these other mothers?”
The letter touched Colonel Roosevelt deeply. “I felt a real pang when I received this letter,” he wrote, “because the thought suggested had been in my mind and yet I had failed to express it.” The editorial, “Sacrifices on Cold Altars,” which he wrote in response, gave consolation from the heart. It made it clear that all who had given their lives in the country’s service, whether in action or from disease, stood on “an exact level of service and sacrifice and honor and glory.” It concluded:
The mother or wife whose son or husband has died, whether in battle or by fever or in the accident inevitable in hurriedly preparing a modern army for war, must never feel that the sacrifice has been laid on “a cold altar.” There is no gradation of honor among these gallant men and no essential gradation of service. They all died that we might live; our debt is to all of them, and we can pay it even personally only by striving so to live as to bring a little nearer the day when justice and mercy shall rule in our own homes and among the nations of the world.
From his entrance to the hospital until his departure on Christmas day, the editorials were less frequent. The Peace Conference, the Congressional elections, and the League of Nations were uppermost in public thought, and on these subjects the Colonel wrote several editorials. Both Colonel Roosevelt and The Star were anxious to find some means to lessen the chance of war through international organization. Both feared, from President Wilson’s addresses, that he had in view some grandiose plan that would be impractical. In December a member of The Star’s staff visited the Colonel in Roosevelt Hospital, New York. At that time he had written one or two editorials discussing the subject in a tentative way. He was asked if he did not think he could say something more positive.
“I doubt it,” he said. “I feel there is so little that really can be done by any form of treaty to prevent war that it would be disappointing for me to point it out. Any treaty adopted under the influence of war emotions would be like the good resolutions adopted at a mass meeting. We have an anti-vice crusade. Everybody is aroused. The movement culminates in a big meeting and we adopt resolutions abolishing vice. But vice isn’t abolished that way.”
Correspondence on the subject followed, and December 28, 1918, he wrote this letter to the member of the staff who had been talking with him:
In substance, or, as our friends the diplomats say, in principle, I am in hearty accord with you. But do you really think we ought to guarantee to stand with France and Italy in all future continental wars? It’s a pretty big guarantee and I don’t know whether it would be made good. Indeed, I don’t know whether it ought to be made good. I am most heartily with France and England now, but I certainly would not have been with France fifty years ago or with England sixty years ago, and our clear duty to antagonize Germany has slowly become apparent during the last thirty or forty years. Remember that you are freer to write unsigned editorials than I am when I use my signature. If you propose a little more than can be carried out, no harm comes, but if I do so it may hamper me for years. However, I will do my best to write you such an article as you suggest: and then probably one on what I regard as infinitely more important, namely, our business to prepare for our own self-defense.
As for Wilson having with him the bulk of the people who are taken in by this name [The League of Nations], I attach less importance to this than you do. He is a conscienceless rhetorician and he will always get the well-meaning, foolish creatures who are misled by names. At present anything he says about the World League is in the domain of empty and windy eloquence. The important point will be reached when he has to make definite the thing for which he stands.
The article written in response to the promise in this letter was Colonel Roosevelt’s last contribution to The Star. It was dictated at his home at Oyster Bay, January 3, which was Friday. His secretary expected to take it to him for correction the following Monday. Instead an early call on the telephone that morning told of his passing away in his sleep.
Ralph Stout